My Amazing Email Exchange With Steve Jobs

I didn't plan to pick a fight with Steve Jobs
last night. It just sort of happened: An iPad advertisement
ticked me off; I sent the Apple CEO an angry email; he told me
about "freedom from porn."

The electronic debate proceeded from there.

Of course, there was a bit more to it than that. There's the
context: Jobs' legal fight
with my employer Gawker Media, over the handling of an iPhone
prototype; my
long-simmering
worries about Apple's growing
power to limit self expression through its lockdown on iPad apps;
and the fact that my wife, who might normally (and quite
sensibly) veto the idea of spending Friday night sending email
flames, was out of town.

So in retrospect I was primed to lash out. But there was some
serendipity too: Watching a new episode of 30 Rock on my
digital video recorder, I somehow failed to skip over an Apple ad
I'd never seen before, one that billed the iPad as nothing less
than "a revolution." You can see an excerpt of the ad at the
bottom of this post.

With a Stinger
cocktail at my side, I dashed off a short, pointed question
to Jobs' well-known email address.

A few hours later—after midnight here in California—he got back
to me. And I got back to him. And so on.

I didn't identify myself as a writer for Gawker in my initial
email, sent from my ryantate.com email address. But, as
you'll see in the exchange below, I eventually made my
affiliation clear, and Jobs didn't seem bothered. Between that
and the fact that Jobs regularly uses emails to disclose new
information to the public, knowing full well recipients now
regularly make the exchanges public, I feel fine reproducing the
thread below.

It's a feisty discussion, as you'll see. And heated, especially
on my part.

Rare is the CEO who will spar one-on-one with customers and
bloggers like this. Jobs deserves big credit for breaking the
mold of the typical American executive, and not just because his
company makes such hugely superior products: Jobs not only built
and then rebuilt his company around some very strong opinions
about digital life, but he's willing to defend them in public.
Vigorously. Bluntly. At two in the morning on a weekend.

As much as Jobs and his actions anger me, and as harsh as I was
to him, I came away from the exchange impressed with his
willingness to engage.

Some notes on the actual content follow after the emails. Click
any message to enlarge:

A few notes on the emails:

There's something absurdly Orwellian about Jobs' line that
the iPad provides "freedom from porn." It's a statement I suspect
will haunt him.

My line about Flash and my MacBook Pro is silly; Flash as a
Web plugin is, as I myself have written, a resource hog, no
matter how well the miraculous battery in my Apple laptop handles
that hoggery. There's no telling how Flash might hobble my
iPad''s A4 processor. But cross-compiled Flash apps are an
entirely different matter: They run as native Objective C code,
and Apple has a chance to review them for performance. Apple has
never tried to argue that cross-compiled Flash wears batteries
down any more quickly than other Objective C code, and in fact
approved more than two dozen such apps before changing its
policies.

Speaking of regrettable lines: Why the heck did I bring up my
wife in connection with "freedom from porn?" I was trying to say
it's a canard that porn somehow harms families, or something
terrible and shameful, so I mentioned the other half of my
family.

I was a little unfair summarizing my contact with Time Inc.;
the company has not "crowed" about its
iPad bridge software, and in fact has plans to iteratively
improve its iPad product. That line was based on email exchange
that I had with a Time Inc. executive who was speaking off the
record and not on behalf of the company. As such, I've blurred
a name that I had no business dropping. But I do think, as I
said, that a native Objective C app that merely contains
magazine content, like Time's, is a lot less exciting
than an app that has some real interactivity, even if it's been
cross compiled from Flash.